Update on Saratoga Citizen

Saratoga Citizen’s Brent Wilkes addressed the City Council Tuesday night about the group’s efforts to get a change of government vote on the fall ballot. Here’s what Wilkes said:

“Saratoga Citizen continues to urge the City Council to put our Charter reform law on the ballot. As you may know, we have complied with the provisions for citizen initiative petitions outlined in Municipal Home Rule Law. We submitted a first petition in July of 2010. Mr. Franck, in his role as City Clerk, said it didn’t meet all the requirements of law, so we went to court. The court agreed with us that the first petition met all the requirements of law and ordered Mr. Franck to issue a certification that said as much. Mr. Franck issued that certificate in January of 2011.

Because the City Council chose not to submit our proposed law to the voters within two months, we submitted a second petition that would compel the City to put our charter reform law on the ballot. Mr. Franck said that second petition did not meet all the requirements of law, so we went to court again. This time the judge said we submitted that petition prematurely because the court hadn’t yet determined that the first petition was good at the time we submitted the second petition. So we submitted the second petition again on March 25, 2011. Under the Municipal Home Rule Law, the City Clerk has 20 days to review that second petition and issue a certification. Those 20 days expired on April 14th.

We now understand that the City’s attorneys have said that Mr. Franck does not need to review the second petition because there is an automatic stay arising from the City’s appeal of the first court decision. Our attorneys tell us that is not correct. While the City is entitled to an automatic stay, that stay applies only to proceedings to enforce the judge’s order. In this case, the judge ordered Mr. Franck to certify that our first petition met all requirements of law. Generally speaking, when a judge orders you to do something you have to do it, but if you appeal the judge’s order before you do it, the automatic stay prevents your opponents from asking the court to make you do it.

Had Mr. Franck decided he didn’t want to certify that our first petition met the requirements of law, the City could have appealed the judge’s order right away, and we would not have been able to go to court to ask the court make him issue the certification. But instead, Mr. Franck did the right thing: He complied with the Court’s order by issuing the certification, and he did so before the City appealed. Because Mr. Franck has done what the court told him to do, we don’t need to go to court to make him issue the certification on that first petition. So the automatic stay is only protecting the City from a motion we don’t need to make. Mr. Franck did the right thing and followed the judge’s order.

Our attorneys tell us that the automatic stay doesn’t have anything to do with the second petition. It didn’t stop the clock on the City Council’s review of our proposed local law. The law gave the City Council two months to review it and decide if you want to submit it to the voters. You have had it since last July 2010—more than enough time to consider and submit it if you had chosen to. We believe it is now time to give the people of Saratoga Springs a chance to decide.

The automatic stay also does not diminish the obligations of Mr. Franck to review our second petition and issue the certification required by the Municipal Home Rule Law. Because Mr. Franck has been quoted in The Saratogian saying that “My assumption is that the signatures are good and the signatures are sufficient,” we hope that he will once again do the right thing and comply with the law and issue a certificate stating that the second petition also meets the requirements of law.”